Posts Tagged ‘web browsers’

Web browsers come in various shapes and sizes: different users will have different ones, and inevitably different versions of the same one. When CSS3 arrived browsers began adding support for it before the specification had been finalised and so used vendor prefixes.

The result, now we have a standardised CSS3, is that some users have proper CSS3 support and some have the support, but only behind a complicated series of vendor names. Therefore, if you want to use flexbox for example, you cannot just rely on display: fiex; as for some users it will only work with the appropriate vendor prefix.

This means you have to tediously insert all of these vendor prefix statements to get cross-browser compatibility. However, there is a tool called Autoprefixer that takes this hassle away. It is an NPM module that converts your regular CSS into CSS with vendor prefixes. You write:

display: flex;

And you get:

display: -webkit-flex;
display: -ms-flexbox;
display: flex;

This means you have to compile your CSS. However, if you are already compiling from LESS or SASS, it’s really easy to integrate it. On one of my current projects I already had Gulp compiling SASS, so it was one-liner to add the step in. SitePoint have a tutorial on how to set it up.

As we know from the whole religion business a lot of us have been involved in over the past few years, it is very difficult for someone to change their mind. It really takes a lot, especially when you’re emotionally invested in something.

I’ve been a champion of the Firefox cause for many years now and I think the Mozilla Foundation have done some great work.

But I can’t champion its name anymore.

Let’s face it, it’s just rubbish these days. Their rapid release cycles have brought around faster versions, but this has just made them increasingly unstable and still trailing the competition.

Firefox uses up more memory than anything else on my computer. Anything else! I run Zend Studio. That is based on the massively bloated Eclipse Studio, and then Zend came along and added a lot more bloat, and it still uses less memory than Firefox!

So, unfortunately, I’m cutting my ties.

I’ve already replaced my Firefox/Opera combination at work with a Chrome/Opera combination, and plan to do the same on my laptop as well. The only thing I have held out with on Firefox for this long was Firebug, and Chrome’s Developer Tools and Opera’s Dragonfly do just as good a job, once you get into them.

Farewell, Firefox, you broke my heart :(.

Having finally got round to upgrading to Firefox 3 I have to say that I am impressed. It’s quite an improvement on Firefox 2 despite what quick makeover may suggest.

My biggest problem with Firefox 2 was that it eats memory like Claire eats men. Firefox 3 however seems far more conservative and doesn’t continue to plough through all your system resources until everything is gone. I leave my desktop open 24/7 with my browser open and Firefox 2 would just clunk up, it would take ages just to do things like open a new tab after a while and I would have to restart it. Firefox 3 is much faster, new tabs open immediately.

The second big improvement is that the download manager can now resume interrupted downloads so no longer will you get half way through a download only to find it dropped out for a second and you now have to restart the whole thing.

I haven’t really had a good look around the other new features and changes but they seem to have really hit the nail on the head with fixing Firefox’s shortcomings.